Hylozoic soil - mechanical earth.

Philip Beesley's “Hylozoic Soil” in Montreal – this stuff is unbelievable. I found it during my portfolio binge and didn’t have the energy to report it to all my devoted readers (hi mom!) but it relates to a project I was developing for my portfolio that didn’t make it in… Hylozoic Soil reacts to human presence, like some renaissance garden folly/fantasy, the very earth comes alive to meet your needs.
The prototype seems reacts to human presence, it seems designed to amaze and possibly terrify - it tries to touch you. !

what hylozoic means.

architecture and the modern experience

David Claerbout is currently exhibiting at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, which I just visited (I figured I may not be in Boston that much longer, so I should take advantage of all the free awesomeness that I can). His work, from what I could tell, deals a lot with the passage of time, light as a marker/narrator of a sequence of images or scenes, and from my brief visit a lot about modern loneliness (a condition that is thoroughly modern, I have recently come to realize and will address individually at some point).

Naturally his emphasis on light creates a great deal of emphasis on space, inserting something architectural into many pieces. One seemed to comment directly on a question modern architecture has been dancing around for a while: the role of self-determination, community determination, and variety.

“Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007”, is a series of images, like a slide show, of a blissful afternoon shared by an extended Chinese family in the courtyard of a massive, urban-renewal/Corbusian housing development. After a few slides pass, emptiness begins to undermine sincerity, both of the activity (a few children toss a ball, all watch) and of the housing project (thousands must live in the complex, only one other party is seen). It begins to seem set up, promotional, propagandistic.

While this calls into question many aspects of modern living, for me it highlighted the role of self-determination in modern architecture: in our scale-crazed development paradigm, do we really deliver usable assets to clients? Did this family choose this bleak community of their own free will, and would others? Modern Americans do not, a visit to any of these archi-dictatorial creations will reveal.

Who does the architect serve, and who should be served?

why I love bare concrete monoliths

Library at the University of Brasilia (UNB), from MasonPritchett's Rotch travelling scholarship blog.

the breaking point

New technologies have a tendency to bull-doze the previously existing systems, video kills the radio star, so to speak. But you don't want to always watch a video, for example, while you are driving. Video has turned out to be a compelling way to re-tell a song and develop themes that are not explicit in the audio alone, and is a fantastic complement to radio - however, I don't think too many hard working people get home from work and watch music videos. They do, however, listen to the radio all the way home. New technologies overwhelm, people take them too far, but eventually they reach a breaking point after which they settle down and complement existing ones, enriching rather than just replacing.

Cars opened entire new worlds to our parents and grandparents - any mid-century movie is flush with the romance of the automobile, hard to deny. The lifestyles it has afforded are bewildering in retrospect - an entire generation moved from cramped, dirty cities into lush, spacious towns, remote except for the high-speed luxury of the automobile. But our generation has witnessed the wastelands spawned by this lifestyle, the placelessness, the degraded urban condition even while our cities are enriched by this accelerated transportation.

We sit in our cars, alone, stuck in traffic on the way to the greater togetherness cars promised.

It seems we have reached a breaking point with regard to automobile dependency, people seem to be slowly recognizing the comfort and vivacity of pedestrian life, not to mention its environmental benefits. Cars are an essential complement to urban life, bringing greater concentration and diversity to and between, but they are a means and not an end.

Mitchell Joachim's 'soft car', more an urban planning tool than automobile advancement (of course it is that, too).
new urbanism, a good impulse popularly embraced
pressure for density in my own Boston neighborhood


The same can be said of the standard computer, the time will come when we free ourselves from the relentless screen-restricted information and find other ways to interface with an increasingly networked humanity.

There is no cool site or article to link to for this, I'm just putting my thoughts down.